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Material Religion in Modern Britain
The Spirit of Things
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eBook - ePub
Material Religion in Modern Britain
The Spirit of Things
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About This Book
This volume contributes towards to developments in the study of religion that illuminate the plural nature of religious change in modern Britain. It makes a critical intervention in British studies of religion by bringing the analytical insights of material culture, to bear on religion in the British World.
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Yes, you can access Material Religion in Modern Britain by Timothy Willem Jones, Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Timothy Willem Jones,Lucinda Matthews-Jones in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & History of Religion. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
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History of ReligionPART I
Material Sectarianism
CHAPTER 1
Objects of Transcendence: Scots Protestantism and an Anthropology of Things
Joseph Webster
Introduction
How are objects used differently within different types of Protestantism? Proceeding from this question, this short anthropological essay takes as its ethnographic point of departure two apparently contrasting deployments of the Bible within contemporary Scotland, one as observed among Brethren and Presbyterian fisher-families in Gamrie, coastal Aberdeenshire, and the other as observed among the Orange Order, a Protestant marching fraternity, in Airdrie and Glasgow. By examining how and with what effects the Bible (as text and object) enters into and extends beyond the everyday practices of fishermen and Orangemen, I sketch some aspects of the material life of Scottish Protestantism that have hitherto been overlooked. The tendency to downplay the role of objects within Protestantism seems, in part, to be the result of an ideal-typical insistence that this religionâespecially in Scotland and the Global Northâremains transfixed by a thoroughly anti-material asceticism.1 This tacit assumption, which emerged within anthropology as the result of an overly hasty reading of Max Weber, continues to haunt ethnographic and theoretical framings of both Protestantism and modernity, either through their relative silence on the subject, or by treating (modern, Protestant) objects as somehow exceptional and novel.
Yet it cannot be denied that an important aspect of Weberâs sociology of religion claims that the âmysticismâ of pre-Reformation Christianity was, with the arrival of Calvinism, capitalism, and modernity, thoroughly replaced by the rationalism of book-religion.2 Thus, the âmaterial lifeâ of the Bible as the foundation on which to build an argument about the âtranscendence of objectsâ is taken as a deliberately difficult case in point. If a central archetype of modernism and Protestantismâmass produced Bibles printed in the vulgar tongueâcan nonetheless be shown ethnographically to have an âenchantedâ material life (that is, to be âobjects of transcendenceâ), then we will have come a good deal of the way toward correcting what has been, up to now, a rather stubborn misconception about Protestantismâs supposed allergy to things.
My argument is that the transcendence of religious âbeliefsâ and the immanence of material âthingsâ co-constitute each other, with the result that life becomes enchanted, or âalive with a kind of magic.â In order to widen the scope of my argument, I also profile other objects that act as material bearers of enchantment. In Gamrie, among my Brethren and Presbyterian informants, I take up the materiality of âgospel tractsâ and âSunday clothes.â Among the Orange Order in Airdrie and Glasgow, I consider the material culture of parading garb and regalia. By profiling these various objectsâbibles, tracts, suits, head coverings, collarette âjewelsââthis chapter makes two contributions to recent conversations about the materiality of religion.
First, my ethnographic argument considers how different forms of Scots Protestantism actively grapple with âthe spirit of things.â While the anthropology of Christianity has been booming over the last decade, there have been few ethnographic studies of Protestantism in Northern Europe, and fewer still that focus on Britain. This chapter adds to this body of literature by attending to two cases of âmaterial religion,â as found within Brethrenism and Orangeism in Scotland. Second, my theoretical analysis attempts to highlight why these two cases may be of interest to scholars of religion more generally. Why, in Gamrie, was walking to church, Bible in hand, considered to be a powerful act of âtestimonyâ? Why do Scottish Orangemen always parade behind an open Bible, wrapped in cling film and topped with a plastic crown? Why are both groups so particular about dress code when engaging in these ritual acts of walking? And what, if anything, do these ethnographic observations tell us about the (material) relationship between human and non-human agency, or about the (material) co-constitution of modernity and enchantment?
I answer these questions through a re-reading of Alfred Gellâs work on distributed personhood.3 I show how the âmaterial worldâ of contemporary Protestantism is no less enchanted than the âspirit worldâ of the pre-Reformation, pre-Enlightenment era. Thus, my broadest theoretical conclusion is not that âweâ (ostensibly rational social scientists) or âtheyâ (ostensibly irrational âbelieversâ) have never been modern. Nor is it that âweâ (and âtheyâ) exist in some âa-modernâ or ânon-modernâ world of âhybrids,â âchimeras,â and âquasi-objectsâ suspended within âa single proliferation of transcendence.â4 Rather, my argument is that, because immanence and transcendence are materially inseparable, we have never been disenchanted, while nonetheless remaining thoroughly modern.
Context
For 15 months between 2008 and 2010, I lived in Gamrie, a small Aberdeenshire fishing village that is home to seven hundred people and six âfundamentalistâ Protestant churches (four Brethren, two Presbyterian). During this time I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, primarily focusing on the two aspects of life that most occupied Gamrie society, namely religion and fishing. While Gamrieâs fishermen included those in their teens to those in their seventies, those most committed to the villageâs Brethren âmeeting hallsâ and Presbyterian âkirksâ were predominately elderly. These older Christians, as well as being self-proclaimed âfundamentalistsâ (who organized their lives around the dual principles of biblical literalism and social separatism), were also strongly millenarian, having been influenced by John Nelson Darbyâs nineteenth-century dispensationalist eschatology and by its popular reworking within American Protestant fundamentalism.5 As such, they eagerly anticipated the imminent apocalypse, and did so by actively identifying many different divine and demonic âsigns of the timesââin social, political, economic and everyday lifeâthat continually (and communally) frame the present as the âlast of the last days.â While these signs were multifarious, my informantsâ theological commitments to Christian Zionism and their financial commitments to the fishing industry often meant that the activities of Israel and the European Union were held to be (respectively, divine and demonic) indexes of the unfolding eschaton.
Yet, in Gamrie the material and eschatological nearness of both God and the devil did not nullify my informantsâ sense of being modern persons. This is because, as Christian âbelievers,â they were strongly committed to a (foundationally modernist) version of Reformed Protestantism that emphasized the interiority of personal salvation, the inalienability of freedom of conscience, and the imperative of individual Biblical interpretation. Equally, as deep sea fishermen, Gamrieâs Christians operated within a (again, foundationally modernist) capitalistic mode of production that engaged in intensive, industrial-scale natural-resource exploitation, as held within a highly complex and (ostensibly) rationalistic and scientific EU bureaucracy. On board Gamrieâs trawlers, this âharvesting of the seasâ occurred through a mechanization of human labor that was itself founded upon the âcallingâ to productively engage in the competitive zero-sum game of personal wealth accumulation.
And accumulate wealth they did. With standard-size trawlers costing around ÂŁ2 million, and much bigger pelagic vessels costing upwards of ÂŁ25 million, Gamrie was reputed to have the highest number of millionaires per head of population in Scotland. When the fishing was good, deckhands, being paid a share of the catch, could earn over a thousand pounds a week; more experienced crew and those with additional roles on the boat (such as the engineer) were paid more. Skippers, who were also generally boat owners, received a far larger proportion of catch profits, with most said to be millionairesâand this despite the enormous mortgages they took out to start (and grow) their businesses.
My second ethnographic investigation into Scots Protestantism emerges from a very different fieldwork experience among members and supporters of the Loyal Orange Institution, known as the Orange Order, (founded in Ireland in 1796; Scotland c1800), a Protestant parading organization with an established public presence in much of Lowland Scotland, particularly in the post-industrial West. The Order is ultra-British and ultra-Unionist, and its public pronouncements are fiercely anti-nationalist and anti-independence. The Order views itself as a staunch defender of British values, understood to encompass not only Protestantism and Unionism, but also fraternalism, patriotism, conservatism, royalism, loyalism, militarism, and colonialism. Many of the Orderâs critics would also seek to add anti-Catholicism and thus, sectarianism, to this list.
Importantly, the Orange Order publicly embodies the positionality of these multiple âismsâ (in different combinations, and to different degrees) through the established rhythms of the âMarching Season,â culminating in annual âBoyne demonstrationsâ on July 12th. Intriguingly, the Order reputedly has more parades annually in Glasgow than in Belfast and London/Derry combined, granting the Institution an unparalleled position as the literal standard-bearers of the Union Flag on Scotlandâs urban streets. The distribution of the Institutionâs membership and activities meant that, while I was in the field for a similar period of time, (14 months, from June 2012 to August 2013), this project differed from earlier fieldwork insofar as it was distinctly âmulti-sited.â Thus, as well as spending considerable amounts of time each week in âloyalistâ Bridgeton (in Glasgowâs East End) and Airdrie, I also spent time in different communities across Scotlandâs Central Belt. I also took shorter trips to Northern Ireland to conduct interviews and comparative fieldwork. My most sustained engagements with Scottish Orangemen came from spending time with volunteers at the âOrange Archiveâ at Olympia House (headquarters of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland) in Bridgeton, and with those who came to drink and socialize in the Airdrie Orange Social Club. With few exceptions, these key informants were generally retired, working-class men in their mid-sixties to their early eighties.
As well as attending many other official Orange events,...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Materiality and Religious History
- Part I: Material Sectarianism
- Part II: Material Religion, Sex, and Gender
- Part III: Material Religion in Postsecular Britain
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index